You Are needed.
And you are needed now more than ever.
Your family and friends need you. Your community needs you. Your work needs you.
The oppressed and the privileged need you.
Whales need you. Grasslands need you. Bees need you. Rivers need you. Soil needs you.
You need you.
We need each other... more to the point.
It can all be rather overwhelming.
All we can do is do our best in each moment and keep learning and working through our personal issues and barriers and blind spots so we can come to all those needs from an increasingly whole place over time. A colleague likes to say 1% improvement a day on one issue is a manageable pace. Makes sense. These things take time. Major shifts are nice, and they do happen, but they aren't as common as we might like them to be! And even they require integration time.
So.
Sometimes you need someone to stand at your shoulder
to hold your hand
to lift you up
to be a mirror
to sense into the emerging future
to help you find your way back to yourself
to hold space for you to do what you need to do.
Life is complex, subtle and nuanced. Soundbites and quick fixes don't help or hold in my experience. We all need time and patience to unpack, work through, loosen and shift difficulties that require digging deep and working toward integration of emerging ways to be in our lives.
"Lot of craziness, confusion, and sadness in the world right now. Unfortunately, more will come. Important for all of us to be doing our internal work; continue to be on a path of increasing knowledge and consciousness, challenging our own inequitable or harmful inclinations and biases, and furthering our healing journey. Humanity will need many healthy, loving, grounded people to navigate the coming decades. Sending love, encouragement, and strength to you all." ~ Evon Peter
THE SUBVERSIVE SOUL
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul-life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence, but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a fuller union with the world. The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counselor’s central puzzle, the biographer’s conundrum, the saboteur of the puritanical and the unimaginative; an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a flow: an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart; a pilgrim often suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who would much rather fail spectacularly at their own life than succeed drably at someone else’s.
Winter Thoughts © David Whyte 2018
If that resonates with you, you might enjoy this article written by visionary Charles Eisenstein, The Age of We Need Each Other.
https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/the-age-of-we-need-each-other/
And you are needed now more than ever.
Your family and friends need you. Your community needs you. Your work needs you.
The oppressed and the privileged need you.
Whales need you. Grasslands need you. Bees need you. Rivers need you. Soil needs you.
You need you.
We need each other... more to the point.
It can all be rather overwhelming.
All we can do is do our best in each moment and keep learning and working through our personal issues and barriers and blind spots so we can come to all those needs from an increasingly whole place over time. A colleague likes to say 1% improvement a day on one issue is a manageable pace. Makes sense. These things take time. Major shifts are nice, and they do happen, but they aren't as common as we might like them to be! And even they require integration time.
So.
Sometimes you need someone to stand at your shoulder
to hold your hand
to lift you up
to be a mirror
to sense into the emerging future
to help you find your way back to yourself
to hold space for you to do what you need to do.
Life is complex, subtle and nuanced. Soundbites and quick fixes don't help or hold in my experience. We all need time and patience to unpack, work through, loosen and shift difficulties that require digging deep and working toward integration of emerging ways to be in our lives.
"Lot of craziness, confusion, and sadness in the world right now. Unfortunately, more will come. Important for all of us to be doing our internal work; continue to be on a path of increasing knowledge and consciousness, challenging our own inequitable or harmful inclinations and biases, and furthering our healing journey. Humanity will need many healthy, loving, grounded people to navigate the coming decades. Sending love, encouragement, and strength to you all." ~ Evon Peter
THE SUBVERSIVE SOUL
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul-life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence, but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a fuller union with the world. The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counselor’s central puzzle, the biographer’s conundrum, the saboteur of the puritanical and the unimaginative; an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a flow: an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart; a pilgrim often suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who would much rather fail spectacularly at their own life than succeed drably at someone else’s.
Winter Thoughts © David Whyte 2018
If that resonates with you, you might enjoy this article written by visionary Charles Eisenstein, The Age of We Need Each Other.
https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/the-age-of-we-need-each-other/
LET A FEELING CRACK YOU OPEN
Here's the bad news:
You can't get 'over' a feeling.
You can't get 'past' it.
You can't release it.
You can't let go of it.
You can't transform or transmute it.
You can't even heal it.
All these ideas come from the mind,
not the body, not the Heart.
They are all subtle forms of violence,
sneaky ways of saying 'no' to a feeling,
aiming for its disappearance,
its death.
We learn to let go of 'letting go'.
We stop trying to release.
We end the exhausting effort to heal.
Instead, we are present.
We offer a feeling our simple presence.
Our non-resistant attention.
Our love.
Here's the good news:
In this field of presence
the feeling is no longer a problem,
an enemy, an aberration, a stain,
a block to freedom.
It is no longer 'something wrong'.
It is no longer 'negative'.
It is no longer a threat.
It is no longer an unwanted child.
You are now its guardian, its protector,
its loving parent, its Home.
And held lightly, in a still space of allowing,
the feeling stays for a while, or moves on,
or returns,
or never returns,
but either way,
you are healed from the need
to find healing elsewhere.
You do not heal feelings, you see,
they heal you, when you allow them
to guide you back
to your original Wholeness,
your loving nature,
your breath,
your place on this Earth.
- Jeff Foster